


Before the war, and after the peace

by imsfire



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: AU, Angst and Feels, Gen, Hope, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies, background Cassian Andor/Jyn Erso - Freeform, canon parental death, enduring what must be borne, holding onto dreams, implied future family life, mention of PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-10
Updated: 2019-06-10
Packaged: 2020-04-24 04:21:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,883
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19165720
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imsfire/pseuds/imsfire
Summary: The boy who threw rocks had known exactly why he did it.   Cassian Andor would not stand back and say he’d let his dreams die undefended.From the beginning of his life Cassian has fought.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Coming in a day late for Day One of Week Two of Celebrate Rogue One 2019: Cassian, and War and Peace.

The boy who threw rocks knew exactly why he did it. 

His father had told him the galaxy was a place rich in resources and opportunities.  If everyone could work together, if communities like theirs would only stand their ground, it would be possible one day to see those resources shared more equally and all the myriad worlds become places of justice and opportunity for all.  Fest was resource-rich, beautiful, a good place to live, so long as you had a good coat, good boots, and good will in your heart.  Papa had all of these things, all the family did.  It was his dream to see Cassian and Sofia grow up in that hope, in the dream of that new world.

Cassian liked that dream, he could imagine it, vivid and full of life, and it seemed good. 

Their town was as beautiful as a snowcastle, but the occupation came and the troops kicked it down like spiteful boys, because they were ordered to.  And Papa went out to say _This must stop_ , he went to join a great group of men and women saying it, _This must stop, this must not be_ ; they went all the way to another world, to say it the louder.   He went and he didn’t come back.

As the years passed by and his father’s voice grew ever more pale in memory, he could still remember the bright warmth and goodness of that dream.  The galaxy full of hope and opportunity. He knew that his Papa had been a good father, a wise man and a loving one.

His sister had dreams too, but they were light sweet ones, dreams that didn’t taste of big questions or of injustice.  She wanted a sunny day, a chocolate ice-cream stick, and a loth-kitten of her very own, and to go to her friend Lucina’s for a sleepover.  He shared her dreams too, because all of those things were great fun and lovely and any day that any of them happened was a good day.  After their father died she just said “I don’t want a loth-kitten anymore” and he knew it was because like him, she could no longer see any of the sunshine in her dreams.

Their mother would say her prayers every evening, whispering softly over their heads when she thought they were both asleep.  _Give us our daily bread and our home safe around us, sweet Force of others, be in the hearts of all those who surround us, sweet Force stand strongly over us and under us, keep us in safety, keep us in danger, be in the heart of friend and stranger._

When he talked to her about his father’s dreams she cried. 

She told him “I cannot let myself think like that anymore, Cassian.  I need to know you understand that.  Please, my beloved, my precious little man.  I’ve lost too much, I’ve given my heart for dreams and got nothing but pain and fear from the bargain.  Just let me keep you and Sofia alive and safe from danger.  That’s my only dream now.”

“But Mama, Papa said –“

“I know what your father used to say.  Oh, my dearest, bravest boy.  I know what he believed.  I believed it too.” She knelt down on the kitchen floor, so she could look him directly in the eye, and held out her arms. “The galaxy _should_ be free and happy and a place where everyone has opportunities – but it isn’t.  I had so many hopes and plans when I was young.  But I have to put you and your sister first, now.  I can’t pin my faith on dreams when we need food and fuel and to pay our bills, we need a secure home here and now, today.  It breaks my heart sometimes but I just can’t.” Her embrace was love and security, but it was also insistence.  Mama knew best. “Say you understand, mijo.”

“I understand, Mama.” He wasn’t sure he did, but – the family being safe, that had to be a good dream, hadn’t it?  Papa had not been safe, it had turned out, and now Mama was sick with the sickness she called ‘flu, that came and went and came back again, and just for her to be safe seemed a big thing, and an important one, to ask for.  Quite as big as any dream of a new world.  Their world now was so much changed from the hopeful one he’d known before.

Mrs Geferen had a different dream, she dreamed of an insurgency that would tear the guns from the ‘troopers’ hands and liberate Fest from the occupation, that would break down the walls and barriers that divided the free peoples of the galaxy from their birthright.  She gave Cassian and his friends advice, and hope, and missions.  Errands to run, messages to carry, packets to deliver.  She taught them to select the right stones, to throw straight and get back in the shadows.  One day, she said, they’d be soldiers like their fathers, fighting to make the galaxy free. 

Cassian didn’t tell her his Papa had been an engineer; he though she knew that, but she went on saying _soldier_ anyway.

He liked the idea of being a soldier; he’d be able to stand up for freedom then, and do what was right, and protect his mother and Sofia.

The tall boy Vilo from the house on the corner had a dream, of being the best shot in their little gang.  Better than Cassian, better even than Mrs Geferen’s son Annio.  He practised in secret with Cassian, throwing snowballs at a park bench, and stones at the rats in the lane behind the new housing blocks the Republic had built after it bombed half the old quarter of town. 

Cassian wanted to be the best shot too, though he didn’t tell Vilo he was competing for the same dream.

The year after Cassian’s mother died, of the lung disease that she had said was ‘flu, but wasn’t, Sofia fell sick with the same thing.  She was so small, too small, never strong like him, and she died too. 

A month later Vilo was shot through the head when he ran out of an alley to hurl a bottle-bomb at a retreating squad of clone troopers.  His parents wept silently at his funeral, yet another funeral, the whole town aching with so many funerals; and Cassian stood silent too, right at the back, with Annio and Mrs Geferen, waiting to see who would come back to the house to talk about another dream; vengeance. 

All of their dreams were taken from them, as one by one they were themselves taken; reduced, broken, and killed.  In the end only Cassian was left, just one more soldier with a Festan accent and a sniper scope; and he had no more dreams, only a single goal.  To give what remained of his life, wholly and without question; to do anything in his power to change the galaxy that had destroyed his family and his friends and all their hopes and dreams. 

He had nothing else left. 


	2. Chapter 2

He wasn’t doing too badly, all things considered.

His back had never been the same since the fall in the data tower, but the medics had done the best they could with the means they had, and given the timescale and the extent of his other injuries, they’d done a fine job.  He’d had thirty years of mobility, when he might have been in a hover-chair for the rest of his life.  Perhaps it was stiff walking, now, and painful, and perhaps at times he would do better to use a stick.  But it was walking.  He’d walked among frightened crowds in the field and across Imperial bases, and through the forests of Endor, going up to his designated sniping post, and coming back from it that evening, when the whole galaxy seemed to weigh lighter.

His right shoulder had never been the same after Hoth.  Soldiers falling all around him, his own blaster dying, last charge pack exhausted.  In a kind of daze of fury he’d begun throwing chunks of rubble, like the boy he’d once been, ducking in and out from the tunnel opening to hurl another lump of foam-crete or blue-white glacier ice at the advancing ‘troopers.  When the doorway opened behind him and friendly hands dragged him through to safety he’d been barely aware of the pain; but he woke the next morning unable to lift his right arm, a sensation like a scalpel slicing down  from shoulder to deltoid, and the droid in Med Bay told him he’d torn his rotator cuff, forcing himself to throw with ice-cold muscles.  So there was more surgery, more bacta, and an exercise programme he was told he’d have to do on and off for the rest of his life.  But he’d got most of the use of the arm back, in time.

His hearing had thin, wasp-fine whining and buzzing in it, now.  On the right side, especially.  Too many hours of shooting practice, too many times feeling the vibrations from the outmoded silencer crackle through his skull and leave his eardrums fizzing.  If he’d ever been told there were better silencers available he might have asked for one.  But the priority was simply to get working weapons for all, not fancy extras for a few.  As long as there was no audible crack of a shot going off, and the sniper had a chance to escape or enough time to use their lullaby, it wasn’t going to matter to anyone if the old DC-15-series sound suppressors were only partially compatible with Blas-Tech’s current models.  They did their job, and snipers seldom lasted long enough to find out the long-term effects.

For years his heart had pounded at the sound of thunder, and his nightmares had still sometimes been bad even a decade after the armistice.  But he’d been able to hold his children’s hands without shaking, walking them home from school, and to cuddle them close in the safety of his arms when their own bad dreams came sliding in (“But Papa, it was a slug the size of a krayt dragon and it had slime for eyes and it _wanted to squash me_!”).  He’d been able to sit straight and walk straight and stand up straight at the stove, and to lie down to sleep without pain, at the end of the day.  He might have trouble hearing his grandchildren when they came, if they whistled secret codes or played the high-flute; but he would hear their names, as he knew his sons’ names and his daughter’s. 

There had been many dreams of a new world, that one by one were lost along with the lives that cherished them.  There had been a long time of dedication, when the only goal was to give the galaxy the hope it needed, and fight the war it had to endure.  There had been a long time too of coming-to-terms, and healing, and many, many tears.  But then there had been peace, and new dreams at last, that could grow and thrive. 

When things began to go bad again, Cassian Andor would not stand back and say he’d let his dreams die undefended.


End file.
